A Quality Assurance Workflow

by bobroan on March 12, 2013

A workflow can help you “check your work,” whether it’s getting everything you need for a tradeshow booth, revising a document in a heavily regulated environment, processing accounts payable paperwork, releasing product upgrades or countless other situations when you need to do a quality check.

Imagine a company that frequently updates documents and each update needed to have certain features and characteristics checked and verified.

Using a new feature of SharePoint 2013 called “Access Web App,” they create a Microsoft Access interface in which, for each type of document, they list the things that might need to be checked and who could check them.

Then, when a document needs to be checked, the owner of that document uses the Access Web App to select the things to be checked, assign them to people (multiple people can be assigned to check the same thing, and configure the reminder/notification/alert system.

Then the SharePoint workflow takes over.

A “task” is created for each thing to be checked.

Everyone who was assigned a task is sent an email which:

Explains the task and includes links to further information

Provides access to the document by either attaching it or including a link

Provides a way to indicate the task has been completed and report the results either by returning the email or logging onto the shared site.

A dashboard is created with the ability to be filtered various ways

Each task is ​​added and initialized

Notifications are sent with links to the dashboard.

When someone completes their check and submits their results, the workflow updates the task record and notifies the appropriate people about the progress that has just been recorded.

The workflow figures out if it has enough results to act (if more than one person is checking this then there may not be enough results in.)

When all the results for one of the checks are in, it either marks it complete or adds a new task that sends the document off for more work and then a retry in the approval cycle.

At any time, management can see exactly what’s been completed, the status of the work in progress and where there’s a danger of falling behind schedule.

Anyone can see the tasks to which they’ve been assigned.

The notification system contains rules which determine who gets updated about what information and how often.

The reminder system sends reminders at certain times and also alerts management as configured

When the document is finally approved, the new version is made official and announced.​

This doesn’t have to be a document. It could be anything that needs checking.